It wasn’t a tarpaper shack to Emily, it was Home. As far as she was concerned, it was Heaven. With her feet up on the front porch railing, relaxing at the close of a long day, she could still smell the tar. She’d insisted on a front porch, no matter how small the house. It didn’t matter; the smell would go, but her new home would stay.
Emily married North West Mounted Police Constable Earnest Harding almost a year ago, and spent the first six months of the union nagging her new husband to build her a house of her own.
He always said they couldn’t afford to buy their own property until he was older and been promoted. She always said she was a farm girl, he knew that very well when he married her. She needed her own house to grow her own plants inside during the long winters, and her own dirt to plant outside flowers in the spring.
She insisted with a little stamp of her foot that her fingers and toes would simply fall off from the lack of being able to sink into HER OWN DIRT!
Besides which, if she’d had to live in that little tiny bedroom off her sour and grim mother-in-law’s kitchen one moment longer, she surely didn’t know how she’d have held her tongue!
It was late summer of 1905, the day of Emily’s seventeenth birthday.
Earnest finally promised to build this little house one day last winter. Emily had suddenly burst outside in her shawl one bright morning, looked around the large yard snow-covered yard, and then ran across the street to the line of young trees on the hillside, looking for a windfall branch.
After looking around the base of the third tree, she found a strong enough stick and ran back to the wintry yard. She began carving lines into the crisp February snow on the north side of the yard, between the carriage house that faced the back alley and the narrow dirt road going up Scotsman’s Hill at the front.
Impatiently, Emily kicked snow into a groove she’d just made. There was no way she wanted so much of her house right next to Ma Harding’s. Back, back a few feet. She’d make it to fit so they’d not touch or have very much of the houses right next to each other, and still leave room for the privy out back.
Emily concentrated fully on her task, arranging small rooms, dividing them with snow lines. There! She’d done it! She could prove to Earnest that a house
